Badge of Honor : They’re Scouts, complete with uniforms and badges, yet they are like no others. The Beyond Bars troops take outings past metal detectors and barbed wire to visit their mothers in prison--and learn how not to make the same mistakes.

Before they could recite the Girl Scout promise, before they could salute the flag, before they could dig into a box of thin mint cookies, the members of Troop 2000 lined up to pass through a metal detector. They presented their birth certificates and signed their names. This last activity posed a special challenge for Camille, a 5-year-old Daisy Scout, who has not yet learned to write.

But Girl Scouts are known for perseverance. A troop leader guided Camille’s hand while the child scrawled a giant C. Troop 2000 wasn’t about to let a little thing like prison bureaucracy stand in the way of its monthly meeting with mothers who are incarcerated at the California Rehabilitation Center, a medium-security jail and treatment program in Norco.

Racing up the steps two at a time, 10-year-old Faylyn embraced her mother, Michelle, jailed for drug possession and sales. While the pair squeezed each other tight, Faylyn bubbled over with the news of the toy poodle she is caring for at her grandparents’ home in San Bernardino. They stood out in the sunshine, Michelle in prison denims, Faylyn in the bright aqua T-shirt her troop chose as a uniform.

“This is great,” Faylyn said. “I get to see my mother here every month. We talk, we color, we do crafts.” Michelle, heavily made up for her daughter’s visit, dabbed at her eyes.

The meeting began on the patio of what must be one of the only penal institutions where bougainvillea blooms abundantly, and in primly trimmed arrangements. That is not the only surprising decorative feature of a prison built nearly 70 years ago as a luxury retreat.

Armed guards and the menacing, double-wire fence that encircles the property are reminders of the prison’s current purpose. So if at first glance, as Michelle conceded, Norco may be a disconcertingly beautiful jail, “It’s still jail.”

The monthly Scout meetings are more focused than visiting sessions, which can be stilted and tense, Michelle observed. “In Girl Scouts, we’ve talked a lot about my old behavior, and why we dislike it,” she said.

With members from as far as West Los Angeles and Riverside, Troop 2000 is part of a small but burgeoning effort to intercede in a continuum of crime that too often sees children of incarcerated moms and dads follow in their parents’ footsteps. The Norco unit represents the first venture into California by the Girl Scouts Beyond Bars, a novel partnership between law enforcement and the country’s largest and oldest voluntary service program for girls. Four years into its existence, Girl Scouts Beyond Bars--an imposing name that might have leaped right off a tabloid headline, its founders agree--is in place in 13 states and 18 correctional institutes.

In-prison Scouting sessions reflect a steady wave of social awareness measures that include troops for homeless girls, pregnant teens, the daughters of migrant workers and girls in foster care. Girls Inc., another large organization that was formerly known as the Girls Clubs of America, also has branched into juvenile justice intervention.

With just 2,000 girls per year, the Beyond Bars units remain a tiny fraction of the Girl Scouts’ 3.3 million membership. But criminal science researcher Anna Laszlo, of Washington, D.C., and Buffalo, N.Y., said the drop-in-the-bucket argument does not detract from the benefits of almost any effort to work with children of incarcerated parents.

“My general sense is anything to save one child is worth it,” Laszlo said. No data exists on a mother-daughter crime connection, but national figures show that children of incarcerated parents are six times as likely to end up in the juvenile justice system as children whose parents have never been in jail. Bureau of Justice Statistics studies further indicate that 70% to 80% of women in jail are mothers, most often of young children.

The intergenerational link is not dwelt on at Girl Scouts Beyond Bars. But mothers who are in the system are only too aware of the risks and temptations that put them there. On the sunny patio at Norco, a flag-and-pledge ceremony begins each meeting of Troop 2000. Mothers and daughters stand in a circle, holding hands.

“I have five kids,” said Charlene, 26, as she gripped the hand of her 7-year-old daughter, Sherica. Charlene is doing time for crack possession. “I worry,” she said. “I worry about them all the time.”

“Crime is just so easy,” agreed Ellen, 38, who was convicted of petty theft in conjunction with her heroin addiction, and whose three children include 5-year-old Camille. “It’s way too easy.”

A Baltimore city judge had seen one set of mother-daughter criminals too many when, in frustration late in 1992, she contacted the U.S. Department of Justice and urged that something be done for these forgotten females. Even the much-villified midnight basketball leagues proposed by the Department of Health and Human Services to help combat male delinquency--and summarily laughed out of the budget by Congress--represented a well-intentioned, proactive attempt, the judge lamented. That particular day, she had sentenced a mother in the morning and her daughter in the afternoon.

At the National Institute for Justice, the Justice Department’s research arm, program manager Marilyn C. Moses began scouring the country for intervention programs aimed at children of incarcerated parents. She found them to be few and far between, generally short-lived and almost always dependent on one dynamic leader--who usually burned out, fast. Someone happened to mention Scouting, and a collective lightbulb went on.

The infrastructure for dealing with girls from a variety of backgrounds was solidly in place, Moses realized. A value system and work ethic also existed. Not only that, but Girl Scouts were good at transportation, another obstacle.

Girl Scout officials accepted her proposal before she finished making it. To her amazement, the warden of the nearest women’s prison in Maryland was equally enthusiastic. With an initial grant of $15,000, the program was in place in less than three months--a nanosecond on the government stopwatch. Moses said her agency approached at least one major boys’ organization, but with no success.

At the Spanish Trails Girl Scout Council in Montclair, field executive Gloria J. Miller jumped at the opportunity to introduce the Beyond Bars program to her region last May. She found a ready ally in Norco warden Tim Busby.

“I think this program is a potential deterrent,” Busby said. “Anything we can do to keep these kids on the right path has got to be a good thing.” He cast an approving glance in the direction of the 5- to 13-year-old members of Troop 2000, who by now were laminating place mats with their mothers. One mother who regularly attended meetings was in the hospital, leaving just three moms and an equal number of daughters. Active membership varies, hovering around a dozen.

Discouraging the girls from repeating their mothers’ mistakes is definitely one purpose of the program, Miller said. “We try to tell them that they have a choice,” she said. “They can make a choice to end up like their mothers, or they can make a different choice. They know their moms did something wrong to get where they are. With the older girls especially, we try hard to work with them on this point.”

At Norco, mothers who choose to participate in Girl Scouts Beyond Bars must first complete a parenting course. Mothers who break prison rules are yanked out of the program. Conversely, membership becomes a badge of honor. The mothers of Troop 2000 took special pride in earning more than $1,000 for troop activities by selling cookies to fellow inmates.

Transportation is so cumbersome that prison meetings are held just one Saturday a month. But each week that the girls do not see their mothers, they meet locally. They do crafts, they discuss a tough social issue and they talk about their moms.

“I think this gives the girls an important perspective,” Miller said. ‘A lot of them, their mothers never spent any time with them before they went into prison because they were into drugs or other problems. But you know what, those daughters love their mothers in spite of whatever they’ve done.”

In a wish circle where the mothers and daughters shared their secret hopes, Ellen said she has been lucky--so far. Her oldest daughter, who is 22, is in school. At 15, the middle girl also is faring well. Camille, the baby, misses her mother horribly, but seems to understand that her mother is in a kind of protracted timeout because of her misdeeds. Ellen said the prospect of serving as an example to girls--a role model in reverse, as it were--was part of what drew her to the prison Scouting program. “My first thought was, now I can be of some help.”

‘She Can Take the Right Route’

Much more serious crimes bring inmates to the California Institute for Women at Frontera. As members of Girl Scout Troop 2001 assembled alongside the big electric fence for their first meeting, for instance, 11-year-old Jennifer said her mother had been sent to jail for hitting a man over the head with a metal pipe. Jennifer shrugged. “Well, she got to defend herself,” she said.

In anticipation of the visit, Jennifer went to the beauty parlor and had her hair arranged in a mass of thick ringlets. But during the two-hour drive from West Los Angeles, she nervously and methodically pulled each curl straight. Nearly three years had passed since Jennifer last saw her mother. Since her mother’s incarceration she has lived with her father and her grandparents, Jennifer explained, and none of the adults has a car.

Wearing their aqua T-shirts, Jennifer and four other girls waited with patience well beyond their years as bureaucratic complications kept them outside the gates for close to three hours. With her eyes closed, Jennifer folded her hands in prayer. Sometimes, as she prayed, she paced beside the prison entrance.

“Stay on the path!” boomed a stern voice from the elevated guard’s booth.

The girls remained preternaturally calm. It was clear that for them, deferred expectations were the norm as often as not. Making the scene all the more surreal, the girls’ mothers could watch their daughters from a meeting room a few hundred yards away. When at last the fences opened, girls and mothers flooded together.

“Me, I stayed out of trouble just for this, just to see my kid,” said Karen, Jennifer’s mother. She alternated between embracing her child and holding her at arm’s length, gazing at her in wonderment.

When at last they sat next to each other, knees as close as possible, Hollice described why she wanted her 10-year-old daughter, Shalease, to be part of the Girl Scouts Beyond Bars. Recently her daughter has done poorly in school, Hollice said. She blames herself.

“I feel real bad because this is a bad influence on her,” said Hollice, who came to Frontera in 1994 for second-degree burglary. “Now maybe she’ll see that she can take the right route, that this is not the way to go.” Years ago, Hollice remembered, “I was a Girl Scout myself. I had to come here to get her into it.”

Learning Lifelong Lessons

Far away, in the center of the country, it was a special day for Girl Scout Troop 344. Despite its somewhat highfalutin name, the Southern Oaks Girls School in Union Grove, Wis., is a high-security prison for females age 18 and younger. Scouting is a required activity for the inmates here--the only girls’ prison in the country to have its own Scout troop--and today the girls were at last receiving the blue trefoil pins that mark them as Girl Scouts.

Adapting the design for the blue-enameled pin, an accessory for generations, required special consultation from headquarters in New York. Traditional pins have sharp points; in a prison, such jewelry easily doubles as a weapon. After countless meetings, a harmless snap-on design was approved.

“I want you to know how proud we are of you, and how happy we are to present these badges,” said Mary Charles, executive director of the Girl Scout council in nearby Racine. Despite themselves, most of the girls--who on the outside might cringe at the dorky image of a Girl Scout--smiled in return.

“When we initiated it, just the term ‘Girl Scouts’ turned them off,” Charles said. But addressing contemporary life issues soon became a welcome pursuit, along with such daily miracles as growing a garden.

“I think you need to look beyond the simple activity to what the activity is trying to teach them--which is how to grow things, how to work together and that it takes a long time for a seed to grow,” she said. “What we’re looking at is teaching them the processes of life, that you have to wait to reap the benefits.”

While many of the inmates at Southern Oaks bear the tattoos that mark them as gang members, “we are finding that they have not before come together in a positive setting,” Charles said. As a consequence, many have missed out on what Charles called “basic lifelong lessons--how to share, how to care, how to be nice--that most kids learn in kindergarten.”

Troop 344 started at Southern Oaks a year ago, around the time the prison began operation. Charles said her council is only beginning to do follow-up that tracks whether girls continue with Scouting after they leave the jail.

Gender-Specific Intervention

A gathering of Girl Scout Troop 310 in Baltimore added yet another stripe to the rainbow of girl-crime prevention attempts. Today’s topic, ‘Abstinence Methods of Contraception,’seemed a spectacularly clear example of just how far Scouting has traveled since the days when girls learned where on the table to place a doily.

“All right,” said Bobbie, the troop leader. “Which one shall we start with? Withdrawal?”

The two dozen teenagers at the table were all under the supervision of Maryland’s Female Intervention Team, or FIT. The 3-year-old program is unusual in its gender-specificity and team approach to juvenile females who break the law. About 150 counselors collectively oversee 450 girls so that “if you are a young lady having problems, there’s always someone there who is familiar with your case, someone who has a relationship with you,” said FIT originator Marian Daniel, an official with the Maryland Department of Juvenile Justice.

“I’m only here because they make me be here,” Alondra said. Alondra, her hair dyed nearly scarlet and piled to skyscraper proportions, was on probation for aggravated assault.

“What are the possible side effects of not having sex?” asked Bobbie.

“You get real cranky!” Alondra cried out.

Merely getting together and girl-talking like this once a week shows the value of gender-specific intervention, Daniel said. “Girls need relationships, they need affiliation,” she said.

In Maryland, as in other parts of the country, the rate of crime by girls was rising too quickly, and the seriousness of the offenses was growing too steadily, Daniel said. In 1994, crime among girls rose nationally by 23%. These days, Daniel noted, “girls are being arrested for the more traditional male crimes’: breaking and entering, assault, auto theft, and drug sale and possession. The one-size-fits-all approach of applying a program for delinquent boys to girls just wasn’t working, Daniel said, adding: “You can’t continue to paint a wall pink and call it a girls program.”

Mentors, motivational guest speakers and highly structured after-school activities were first steps, Daniel said. Bringing in the Girl Scouts was another cost-free move. “I mean, these girls, the Job Corps hardly wanted them,” Daniel said.

Daniel knows that behind her back, some of the girls consider merit badges too stupid to merit contempt. Yet at the same meeting, another girl swells with pride as she displays a project that earned her a badge--in this case, in geography.

“Many of these families have just disintegrated so much. We’re seeing the end results of families that may have fallen apart years ago,” Daniel said. “There’s no way we can wave a magic wand and erase the years that these girls have missed out on caring or on nurturing. But we can teach some values. Our children need them.”